Please introduce yourself, and tell us a little bit about your start-up.
Barbara Terra.- “Hacknowledge is a cybersecurity start-up that was developed in Switzerland and I am in charge of the development of Hacknowledge on the Luxembourg market. I moved from Switzerland to Luxembourg to start the activity exactly 1 year ago, in September 2018.
We started as a team of 2 and we are now 6 and looking for more security specialists to join (developers, security engineers, pentesters). Hacknowledge is an innovative and self-developed SOC (Security Operations Center) solution.
Our mission is to help companies of any size and any sector in Luxembourg to detect when they are victims of a security incident and react accordingly, even with limited security staff or budget.
We are in the process of building a development center in Luxembourg in order to even better address the specific needs of the local market.
From idea to implementation, there is only one step… and yet. What triggered your entrepreneurial journey?
“Working for years in security integration, I was witnessing and even participating in applying global security solutions such as third-party-SIEMs (Security Information and Event Manager) to small countries and realities such like as Switzerland or Luxembourg. It just doesn’t fit. And prices are abusively high.
The need for security monitoring was there, the market was asking for it, regulations were requiring it, but the existing solutions were too heavy to implement and too expensive compared to what companies would get as a result.
Basically we learnt from others’ limitations, we listened to the local market needs and we developed our own solution accordingly.
This is how Hacknowledge was created by a team of passionate security engineers and developers, listening to the market and developing an innovative SOC (Security Operations Center) according to the needs where global SIEM solutions were failing. Basically we learnt from others’ limitations, we listened to the local market needs and we developed our own solution accordingly.
Do you have any advice for those who are still hesitant to get started?
“I like the quote: ‘Fail to plan is plan to fail.’
We often hear that it is essential to make mistakes. What do you think of that?
“I would rather say it is essential to learn from mistakes, but minimizing mistakes is crucial. Start-ups are vulnerable and the market and the competition are cruel… in the sense that a mistake can sometimes ruin your starting-up with the risk not to be able to leave the starting blocks…
However, when mistakes do happen, it is equally important to analyse them, and learn a lesson from each one of them. In this sense, yes, this is an opportunity to grow and to improve.”
You can register for the Start-up Stories: Round 3 on the website of the .
Discover innovation at Bil
Discover the Innovators of the Lhoft